1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing machine that appropriately performs an initial configuration and a user registration.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, many offices have a plurality of computers connected to a printing machine through a network to share the printing machine among the plurality of computers.
From the perspective of security, to ensure that a user who performed a print request operation on a computer obtains a print, the printing machine outputs the print only when the user who performed the operation is authenticated on the basis of an authentication operation by the user on an operation panel.
To perform such a user authentication, it is necessary to register users who use the printing machine and to determine whether or not a user who performs the operation is a registered user on the basis of the authentication operation by the user on the operation panel.
Patent Literature 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2011-233117) discloses a technique regarding a printing system that includes a printing machine to perform printing, a printing instruction machine to give a printing instruction to the printing machine, and an authentication machine to authenticate a user who operates the printing instruction machine. Specifically, the authentication machine receives a MAC address and the like of a PC that the user operates, and sends a notification of absence of registration to the PC when a user ID, which is associated with a MAC address same as the received MAC address, is not registered in a MAC address data table. The authentication machine then receives a user ID and a MAC address sent from the PC, and registers them in the MAC address data table. When the user ID is already registered, a notification of printing allowance is sent to the PC. The PC that received the notification of printing allowance sends printing data to the printing machine and the printing machine performs printing.
When the number of users who newly use the printing machine increases due to, for example, employment of new workers, it is necessary to register new users before they start using the printing machine. In this case, there is no need to perform an initial configuration for the printing machine, and only the registration of the new users is performed. This shortens setting time.
Moreover, there is a case in which when the printing machine is relocated, or users who use the installed printing machine greatly change due to an entity conversion. In such a case, in addition to the registration of new users, it is often necessary to perform a network setting, a language setting, a time setting, and the like at the same time. For that reason, performing the initial configuration for the printing machine again configures an appropriate usage environment for the printing machine.
The printing system described in Patent Literature 1 does not determine whether to perform the initial configuration or to perform only the registration of new users when MAC addresses are changed. A user is thus obliged to determine either to perform the registration of new users or to perform the initial configuration by oneself. This leads to a useless setting, or a necessary setting is not performed on the contrary, thereby having a malfunctioning in printing.